WordPress Permalinks

WordPress provide a very easy for users, to set up a clean permalinks.

All you have to do is to visit Settings > Permalinks. By default WordPress uses the Plain permalinks, which looks like www.yourdomain.com?page_id=36.

This type of permalink is called “ugly permalink”. As you see that doesn’t offer to much clue about the page in question. Maybe at first glance we can think: “ok it’s about a page that has an id of 36”. But the problem will be with search engines, which really hate “default / plain permalinks”.

If you maybe think that /%postname%/ is a good permalink structure, you might find out that is not as you think. I mean, I haven’t any problem in using the /%postname%/ as my permalink structure, and that was until I’ve read this article. In the article on digwp.com Cris Coyier talks about permalink structure and how this has causes him some trouble. After I read this article, I did a permalink change in order to avoid future problems. If you want to find out more, just follow the link above.

I’ll be honest, at first after I did some reading my first thought was”what about SEO and Google indexation?” If I change now my permalink structure what impact will have this on my ranking? The answer came right away on the same article. I have to say Chris did a really nice job explaining all the downfalls for this changes, even if they are very low.

I will have to run more tests to be sure that I did everything right, but still this is progress from many points of view and I really encourage you to take 10 minutes from your time and read the full article.